Google's Magenta Project: Can Machines Be Musicians?

Through a project called Magenta, Google’s machine learning researchers hope to understand whether computer-generated music can qualify as art. Google I/O 2016: AI, VR Get Day In The Sun (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Google wants to know whether machine learning can be used to create engaging music and art. To find out, the company’s machine learning researchers, the Google Brain team, have released Magenta, a set of open source data models and tools, on social code repository GitHub. “Machine learning has already been used extensively to understand content, as in speech recognition or translation,” said Google research scientists Douglas Eck in a June 1 blog post. “With Magenta, we want to explore the other side — developing algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music, potentially…